Here’s what to know about Wisconsin’s next state budget

Every two years, Wisconsin lawmakers create the state’s next budget. It can be a complex process that involves input from lawmakers and the public, partisan politics, and a lot of rewriting.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers released his $119 billion 2025-2027 budget proposal in February. It includes spending for schools, child care, farmers, and workers.

That proposal will now go through a process of review by the state Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee, which is controlled by Republican legislators. In the past, the committee has scrapped most of Evers’ proposals and written its own budget, and this time around is likely to be no different after Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said Evers’ proposals were “dead on arrival.”

There are bound to be ups and downs and surprises along the way. Here is everything you need to know about the next Wisconsin state budget.

The basics

Wisconsin approves a budget every odd-numbered year that covers the next two years (referred to as a biennial budget). The budget that lawmakers are deciding on now will set all state spending and revenue through 2027, including funding for schools, wages for state employees, maintenance of state-owned buildings and road construction, and taxes.

The governor proposes the state budget in two parts: first the executive budget, which includes funding for state agencies and tax changes; then the capital budget, which includes funding for infrastructure projects.

Evers’ executive budget proposes more than $3.15 billion in K-12 funding, some of which would go toward mental health support for students and universal free school meals; invest more than $500 million to lower child care costs by helping providers increase wages for their employees, investing in employer-sponsored child care and expanding access to child care; support farmers and food production in the state with an additional $80 million; and end the tax on cash tips for service workers.

The $4.1 billion capital budget proposal, released on March 10, includes $325 million for the state’s prisons, more than $195 million for health services facilities across the state, $137 million to upgrade Wisconsin veterans homes and kick-start expansion of the Wisconsin Veterans Museum, and $25 million for clean energy initiatives.

One of the biggest question marks of the upcoming budget continues to be what to do with the state’s surplus, which, it is estimated, will be about $4.3 billion by the end of the current fiscal year. Evers wants to use this surplus to fund the school mental health and child care initiatives in his budget, but Republicans want to use the extra money to give residents tax cuts.

The timeline

The budget process technically starts the year before, when state agencies gather information on what their spending needs for the upcoming budget will be and give those requests to the governor.

The governor then holds public listening sessions and considers the requests from state agencies while the governor drafts the budget. The executive budget proposal is typically announced in February, followed by the capital budget proposal released in March.

After the budget proposals are announced, the Joint Finance Committee holds public listening sessions across the state. So far there have been listening sessions in Kaukauna and West Allis, where education funding was a key issue raised by residents. The final two listening sessions for this budget process are scheduled for April 28 in Hayward and April 29 in Wausau.

After the public weighs in, surgery on the budget will begin in May, when the Joint Finance Committee begins to modify the governor’s proposals.

By June, the State Assembly and the State Senate will vote on the final budget to send to the governor’s desk. Lawmakers have until June 30 — when the state’s fiscal year ends — to approve the budget.

The governor then issues any vetoes and signs the budget into law in early July.

The powerful veto pen

While much of the budget is ultimately decided by the powerful Joint Finance Committee, the governor has one tool that can affect the final form of the budget: the veto.

A nearly century-old state law allows Wisconsin governors to issue partial line-item vetoes on spending bills, meaning they can strike parts of a budget — including single words, sentences or even characters or punctuation marks — without vetoing the entire thing. It’s the only state that gives governors this broad power.

In 2023, Evers used the veto to set school funding increases for 400 years. Republicans originally wrote that K-12 public schools could increase revenue per student by $325 a year for the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 school years, but Evers erased a hyphen and a few digits to say the increase would last from 2023-2425.

A lawsuit brought by Republican lawmakers over the governor’s partial veto power is currently before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. It’s unclear whether the court will make a ruling before the current budget is decided. Republican lawmakers said the legal process could slow down the budget process, while Democratic leaders condemned the potential delay.

“Cities, towns, villages and school boards, and everyone across the state of Wisconsin is counting on us to do our job,” Democratic Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein said, according to Milwaukee station TMJ4. “Not passing a budget is unacceptable and reckless.”